Since the Media Research Center was founded in October 1987,
our mission has been to document, expose and neutralize the media elite’s
liberal bias, and our bi-weekly Notable Quotables, which debuted in
February 1988, has been a vital tool in pursuing this mission. After publishing
more than 500 issues — more than 8,000 notable quotes — we are pleased to bring
you this super-sized 20th Anniversary edition with the most outrageous quotes
from the MRC’s first two decades.

“The Soviet
Union, draped in history, born of bloody revolution, bound together
by a dream that is still being dreamt. It is the dream of a
socialist nation marching towards the first communist state. The
Soviet Union, a mighty union....Once, the Kremlin was the home of
czars. Today, it belongs to the people....Atheist though the state
may be, freedom to worship as you please is enshrined in the Soviet
constitution.”
— From the first night of Ted Turner’s seven-hour TBS cable series
Portrait of the Soviet Union, March 20, 1988.

“[Fidel] Castro has delivered the most to those who had the least....Education was once available to the rich and the well-connected. It is now free to all....Medical care was once for the privileged few. Today it is available to every Cuban and it is free....Health and education are the revolution’s great success stories.”
— Peter Jennings, ABC’s World News Tonight, April 3, 1989.

“A Gulag Breeds Rage, Yes, but Also Serenity”
— New York Times headline over article on last Soviet political
prisoners being released, February 12, 1992.

“Few tears
will be shed over the demise of the East German army, but what about
East Germany’s eighty symphony orchestras, bound to lose some
subsidies? Or the whole East German system, which covered everyone
in a security blanket from day care to health care, from housing to
education? Some people are beginning to express, if ever so
slightly, nostalgia for that Berlin Wall.”
— CBS’s Bob Simon, March 16, 1990 Evening News.

“It’s short of soap, so there are lice in the hospitals.
It’s short of pantyhose, so women’s legs go bare. It’s short of snowsuits,
so babies stay home in the winter....The problem isn’t communism; nobody
even talked about communism this week. The problem is shortages.”
— Commentator John Chancellor talking about the Soviet Union on NBC
Nightly News, August 21, 1991.

“After eight years of what many saw as the Reagan
administration’s benign neglect of the poor and studied indifference to
civil rights, a lot of those who lived through this week in Overtown
[rioting in a section of Miami] seemed to think the best thing about George
Bush is that he is not Ronald Reagan...There is an Overtown in every big
city in America — pockets of misery made even meaner and more desperate the
past eight years.”
— Reporter Richard Threlkeld on ABC’s World News Tonight, January 20,
1989, Reagan’s last day as President.

“The decade had its highs (Gorbachev, Bird)...and the decade
had its lows (Reagan, AIDS)”
— Boston Globe headline over two pages of ’80s reviews by the paper’s
columnists, December 28, 1989.

“The bottom line is more tax money is going to be needed.
Just how much will be the primary issue on the agenda when congressional
leaders meet with the President later today....It now seems the time has
come to pay the fiddler for our costly dance of the Reagan years.”
— Bryant Gumbel opening NBC’s Today, May 9, 1990.

“The amazing thing is most people seem content to believe
that almost everybody had a good time in the ’80s , a real shot at the
dream. But the fact is, they didn’t. Did we wear blinders? Did we think the
’80s left behind just the homeless? The fact is that almost nine in ten
Americans actually saw their lifestyle decline.
— NBC reporter Keith Morrison, February 7, 1992 Nightly News. Census
Bureau data shows median family income increased in all income classes from
1981 to 1989.

“In the plague years of the 1980s — that low decade of
denial, indifference, hostility, opportunism and idiocy — government fiddled
and medicine diddled, and the media were silent or hysterical. A
gerontocratic Ronald Reagan took this [AIDS] plague less seriously than
Gerald Ford had taken swine flu. After all, he didn’t need the ghettos and
he didn’t want the gays.”
— CBS’s John Leonard on Sunday Morning, September 5, 1993.

“You and the President were being party to sending missiles
to the Ayatollah of Iran. Can you explain how — you were supposed to be the
— you are — you’re an anti-terrorist expert! Iran was officially a terrorist
state....The question is — but — you made us hypocrites in the face of the
world! How could you sign on to such a policy?!”
— Anchor Dan Rather in a live interview with Vice President George Bush,
January 25, 1988 CBS Evening News.

“When he entered the race nearly a year ago, he had the
courage to say that as President he would probably have to raise taxes. And
he never recovered from his courage.”
— Peter Jennings on Bruce Babbitt’s dropping out of the presidential race,
ABC’s World News Tonight, February 18, 1988.

“[Soviet dictator Mikhail] Gorbachev has probably moved more
quickly than any person in the history of the world. Moving faster than
Jesus Christ did.”
— Ted Turner as quoted in Time, January 22, 1990.

“By American presidential standards, Mikhail Gorbachev
accomplished enough in his seven-year term to qualify for a bust on Mount
Rushmore.”
— NBC’s Jim Maceda, December 25, 1991 Nightly News.

“What do you do for an encore after ending the Cold War and
reversing the arms race? How about saving the planet? That’s the latest
assignment for Mikhail Gorbachev, having assumed the presidency of the
International Green Cross, a new environmental organization...”
— Time’s “The Week” section, May 3, 1993.

Damn Those Conservatives

“Supreme Court nominee David Souter wants the world to stop
viewing him as a nerd. Senate Democrats want to know if, instead, Souter is
a neanderthal — a mean-spirited conservative bent on wrecking constitutional
protections for women, minorities, and accused criminals.”
— Beginning of September 13, 1990 USA Today cover story by legal
reporter Tony Mauro.

“Corporations pay public relations firms millions of dollars
to contrive the kind of grass-roots response that Falwell or Pat Robertson
can galvanize in a televised sermon. Their followers are largely poor,
uneducated, and easy to command.”
— Washington Post reporter Michael Weisskopf in a February 1, 1993
news story.

“I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he
dies early like many black men do, of heart disease....He is an absolutely
reprehensible person.”
— USA Today columnist and Pacifica Radio talk show host Julianne
Malveaux on Justice Clarence Thomas, November 4, 1994 PBS’s To the
Contrary.

“He [Jesse Jackson] has become here, a kind of new, he’s
acquired a new status. He’s almost like Hubert Humphrey was, a sort of
conscience of the country.”
— Veteran correspondent Eric Sevareid during CBS News coverage of the
Democratic convention, July 20, 1988.

“Greenpeace, the public interest organization, believes that
the Iraqi death toll, civilian and military, during and after the war, may
be as high as 198,000. Allied military dead are counted in the low hundreds.
The disparity is huge and somewhat embarrassing.”
— NBC commentator John Chancellor a year after the first Gulf War ended,
March 12, 1992 Nightly News.

“It’s a morbid observation, but if everyone on Earth just
stopped breathing for an hour, the greenhouse effect would no longer be a
problem.”
— Newsweek Senior Writer Jerry Adler, December 31, 1990.

America, One Giant Mess

“The President was remarkably upbeat for a man who runs a
country with a monstrous national debt, huge balance of trade problems, a
crumbling infrastructure, dirty air, countless homeless people, a
coast-to-coast drug epidemic, and a faltering self-image.”
— CBS This Morning co-host Harry Smith the morning after President
George H. W. Bush’s State of the Union speech, February 2, 1990.

Reprehensible Republicans

“The whole week was double-ply, wall-to-wall ugly....The
Republican Party reached an unimaginable slouchy, and brazen, and constant,
level of mendacity last week....[President Bush] is in ‘campaign mode’ now,
which means mendacity doesn’t matter, aggression is all and wall-to-wall
ugly is the order of battle for the duration.”
— Senior Editor Joe Klein on the Republican convention, August 31, 1992
Newsweek.

“This is a party that is dominated by men, and this
convention is dominated by men as well....Do you think before tonight they
thought very much about what happens in America with rape?”
— NBC anchor Tom Brokaw interviewing rape victim Jan Licence after her
victims-rights speech to the GOP convention, August 13, 1996.

“Over the past 18 months, while Republicans fulminated about
welfare and affirmative action, more than 20 churches in Alabama and six
other Southern and Border states have been torched....There is already
enough evidence to indict the cynical conservatives who build their
political careers, George Wallace-style, on a foundation of race-baiting.
They may not start fires, but they fan the flames.”
— Time national correspondent Jack E. White, March 18, 1996 issue.

Fawning Over Bill & Hillary

“I must say I was struck by the expanse of their chests,
though. They may have to put out their stats.”
— Newsweek reporter Eleanor Clift on Bill Clinton and Al Gore, CNN’s
Inside Politics, July 9, 1992.

“If we could be one-hundredth as great as you and Hillary
Rodham Clinton have been in the White House, we’d take it right now and walk
away winners....Tell Mrs. Clinton we respect her and we’re pulling for her.”
— Dan Rather to Bill Clinton at a May 27, 1993 CBS affiliates meeting,
talking about anchoring with Connie Chung.

“As the icon of American womanhood, she is the medium
through which the remaining anxieties over feminism are being played
out....Hillary Rodham Clinton will define for women that magical spot where
the important work of the world and love and children and an inner life all
come together. Like Ginger Rogers, she will do everything her partner does,
only backward and in high heels, and with what was missing in [Lee] Atwater
— a lot of heart.”
— Time correspondent Margaret Carlson, May 10, 1993.

“His sturdy jaw precedes him. He smiles from sea to shining
sea. Is this President a candidate for Mt. Rushmore or what?...A single
medley of expressions from Clinton may be worth much more, to much of
America, than every ugly accusation Paula Jones can muster.”
— Los Angeles Times television writer Howard Rosenberg reviewing
Clinton’s Inaugural Address, January 22, 1997.

“I’m endlessly fascinated by her [Hillary Clinton]....She’s
so smart. Virtually every time I’ve seen her perform, she has knocked my
socks off.”
— CBS’s Lesley Stahl, as quoted by Gail Shister in the December 8, 1999
Philadelphia Inquirer.

Admiring a Mad Bomber’s Ethics

“[Ted Kaczynski] wasn’t a hypocrite. He lived as he wrote.
His manifesto — and there are a lot of things in it that I would agree with
and a lot of other people would, that industrialization and pollution all
are terrible things — but he carried it to an extreme. And, obviously,
murder is something that is far beyond any political philosophy, but he had
a bike. He didn’t have any plumbing; he didn’t have any electricity.”
— Time reporter Elaine Shannon talking about the Unabomber, April 7,
1996 C-SPAN Sunday Journal.

“[Columbus] sailed just as Jews and Muslims were being
expelled from Spain, the persecution of those peoples and the riches robbed
from them paying for his small armada of ships, the Nina, the
Pinta, and the Santa Maria, to set sail for new plunder. For
Native Americans, the people who hardly felt discovered, Columbus’ landing
commenced a Holocaust. There’s really no other word for the death delivered
by settlers, as they scattered, enslaved, and obliterated Indian nations on
their own sacred lands.”
— Co-host Scott Simon on NBC’s Today, October 11, 1992.

“Some thoughts on those angry voters. Ask parents of any
two-year-old and they can tell you about those temper tantrums: the stomping
feet, the rolling eyes, the screaming. It’s clear that the anger controls
the child and not the other way around. It’s the job of the parent to teach
the child to control the anger and channel it in a positive way. Imagine a
nation full of uncontrolled two-year-old rage. The voters had a temper
tantrum last week [electing a GOP Congress]....Parenting and governing don’t
have to be dirty words: the nation can’t be run by an angry two-year-old.”
— Peter Jennings in his daily ABC Radio commentary, November 14, 1994.

Newt’s Deadly GOP Insurgency

“You called Gingrich and his ilk, your words, ‘trickle-down
terrorists who base their agenda on division, exclusion, and fear.’ Do you
think middle class Americans are in need of protection from that group?”
— NBC’s Bryant Gumbel to House Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt, January
4, 1995 Today.

“The new Republican majority in Congress took a big step
today on its legislative agenda to demolish or damage government aid
programs, many of them designed to help children and the poor.”
— Dan Rather, March 16, 1995 CBS Evening News.

“Next week on ABC’s World News Tonight, a series of
reports about our environment which will tell you precisely what the new
Congress has in mind: the most frontal assault on the environment in 25
years. Is this what the country wants?”
— Peter Jennings in an ABC promo during the July 9, 1995 This Week with
David Brinkley.

“In light of the new welfare reform bill, do you think the
children need more prayers than ever before?”
— Bryant Gumbel to Children’s Defense Fund leader Marian Wright Edelman,
September 23, 1996 Today.

Three Cheers for Liberalism

“I think liberalism lives — the notion that we don’t have to
stay where we are as a society, we have promises to keep, and it is
liberalism, whether people like it or not, which has animated all the years
of my life. What on Earth did conservatism ever accomplish for our country?”
— Charles Kuralt talking with Morley Safer on the CBS special, One for
the Road with Charles Kuralt, May 4, 1994.

“[Rush Limbaugh] is, above all, a sophisticated
propagandist, an avatar of the politics of meanness and envy....He must,
like all demagogues, scare his listeners, get them to believe in conspiracy,
rumor....Like Reagan, Limbaugh is neither curious nor brave; he would rather
tell his audiences fairy tales than have them face the world; he would
rather sneer at the weak than trouble the strong.”
— Former Washington Post reporter David Remnick in the Post’s
Outlook section, February 20, 1994.

“In a nation that has entertained and appalled itself for
years with hot talk on the radio and the campaign trail, the inflamed
rhetoric of the ’90s is suddenly an unindicted co-conspirator in the
[Oklahoma City federal building] blast.”
— Time Senior Writer Richard Lacayo, May 8, 1995.

“The bombing in Oklahoma City has focused renewed attention
on the rhetoric that’s been coming from the right and those who cater to
angry white men. While no one’s suggesting that right-wing radio jocks
approve of violence, the extent to which their approach fosters violence is
being questioned by many observers, including the President.... Right-wing
talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Bob Grant, Oliver North, G. Gordon Liddy,
Michael Reagan, and others take to the air every day with basically the same
format: detail a problem, blame the government or a group, and invite
invective from like-minded people....Never do most of the radio hosts
encourage outright violence, but the extent to which their attitudes may
embolden or encourage some extremists has clearly become an issue.”
— Today co-host Bryant Gumbel, April 25, 1995.

“What must it be like to live in Rush Limbaugh’s world? A
world where when anyone other than conservative, white men attempts to do
anything or enter any profession, be it business, politics, art or sports,
the only reason they’re allowed entry or, incredibly, attain excellence is
because the standard was lowered....Edgy, controversial, brilliant. What a
way to shake up intelligent sports commentary. Hitler would have killed in
talk radio. He was edgy, too.”
— Nancy Giles on CBS’s Sunday Morning, October 5, 2003.

Blame Deaths on Christian Right

“Let’s talk a little bit more about the right wing because I
know that’s something you feel very strongly about. But this is actually not
necessarily about the right wing, but perhaps a climate that some say has
been established by religious zealots or Christian conservatives. There have
been two recent incidents in the news I think that upset most people in this
country, that is the dragging death of James Byrd, Jr., and the beating
death of Matthew Shepard. I just would like you to reflect on whether you
feel people in this country are increasingly intolerant, mean-spirited, et
cetera, and what, if anything, can be done about that.”
— NBC’s Today co-host Katie Couric to former Texas Governor Ann
Richards as she hosted a 92nd Street Y appearance in New York City on March
3, 1999, an event shown by C-SPAN April 3, 1999.

Tim Russert: “Is it hard holding your own views in
check?”
Bryant Gumbel: “You know what? In terms of my political views, I hold
them in check. I don’t think that someone who watches is inclined to think
that I’m one way or the other.”
— CNBC’s Tim Russert, October 30, 1999.

“Largely as a result of the policies and priorities of the
Reagan administration, more people are becoming poor and staying poor in
this country than at any time since World War II.”
— Today co-host Bryant Gumbel, July 17, 1989.

“The boom years following World War II saw the U.S. economy
take off, giving rise to the growth of the great American middle class. The
rising standard of living meant homes, cars, TVs, college for the kids — all
in all, a piece of the American dream. But in the Reagan years, economic
erosion set in, so much so that the middle class now finds itself in
ever-deepening trouble.”
— Gumbel on NBC’s Today, January 22, 1992.

“You’re aligned to a party which owes many of its victories
to the so-called religious right and other conservative extremists who are
historically insensitive to minority concerns. That doesn’t bother you?”
— Gumbel to black Republican U.S. Rep.-elect J.C. Watts on NBC’s Today,
November 9, 1994.

“Let’s not debate his presidency, but his passing. As
opposed to a man like Reagan, [Richard] Nixon was highly regarded as a
genuine statesman with a first-class mind.”
— Gumbel on NBC’s Today, April 26, 1994.